


never felt myself so graceful (you angel you)

by Fluffifullness



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Pining, Wing Grooming, Wingfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27530494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluffifullness/pseuds/Fluffifullness
Summary: “Did I –come back,” Stan says, as though the words themselves are an affront, “or did – did you all…?”Mike doesn’t know what to say to that. No one does. They all have wings, Eddie’s chest is soaked in blood but somehow completely unscathed – they know how it looks, and Stan’s always been the one who needed the most convincing about things that ought to be impossible. Unfortunately, there’s nothing harder to explain than something you don’t fully understand, yourself. Mike knows; he’s tried.(or: What happens when seven varyingly famous Maine natives suddenly sprout massive pairs of wings during a trip to their hometown.)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	never felt myself so graceful (you angel you)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm... alive! And holding myself back from starting either of two AU fics brewing in the back of my mind so that I can finish this first - but dammit, I'm posting chapter one now. This fic aims to be a proper ensemble fic, with POV sections from all the Losers and a relatively equal focus on all pairings. 
> 
> The title is based on lyrics from a) "Swans" by Camera Obscura and b) "You Angel You" by Bob Dylan.

The quarry water is colder than Mike remembers it – but, then, it’s earlier in the day than they all used to come out here; the sun hasn’t had time yet to soak through to the silty bed. The goopy, quicksand feel of it squishing between their toes gives Eddie something new to complain about, although that tangent doesn’t last long before he’s back to gesturing at himself, his back, and the other five of them in varying states of bewilderment.

Secretly, Mike is relieved by Eddie’s dramatics. It’s easier to focus on what’s right in front of him than on what’s behind him – metaphorically  _ and  _ literally.

The slim brown-and-white feathers extend well beyond the reach of his arm, no longer twitching involuntarily with every ticklish drop of water that runs off of them, but not quite dry yet, either. The weight of them is almost enough to pull the rest of Mike back under the surface, as bone-tired as he is. 

“How the hell do you even plan on getting there?” Eddie is demanding of Richie. Once he’s let the wings in his periphery reclaim his full attention, it’s hard for Mike to redirect it anywhere else. There’s a pause, a little bit of a breeze stirring the downy feathers closer to Mike’s back, and Eddie snaps, “Do  _ not  _ say flying.”

“In a plane!” Richie defends.  _ “These  _ barely work, it’d be like walking all the way to California. I’d probably run into a powerline before I made it to Bangor.”

Ben groans. “We’re gonna have to buy about four tickets apiece, huh?”

Mike frowns. His wings jerk again, sending another fine mist of water flying in all directions. He flinches, and when he opens his eyes Richie’s gray wings have unfolded themselves slightly, enough to reveal some darker gray – almost black – spotting. 

“Don’t you  _ own  _ a plane?” Eddie says, sounding skeptical. His arms are crossed, but the dark brown silhouettes of his wings are still recreating the same frenetic gestures he normally makes with his hands. It’s… unnerving, and not just because they’re huge even by comparison to the rest of the Losers’ new appendages – longer, broader, and more imposing. If Eddie’s insurance job entails a lot of meetings – and Mike suspects it does – he can definitely count on commanding a room now.

“Wait,” Mike says, considering. “What if other people can’t see them?”

Beverly turns to face him. Her wings are a more uniform gray than Richie’s, but with an apt smear of sunset orange dusting the tops. The splash of color almost manages to make it look like they belong there, making slow, experimental curling motions while the sun bounces off of them.

“They feel real,” she murmurs, but of course they all know how things can feel real –  _ be  _ real – and still go unnoticed. It wouldn’t make this better, Mike thinks; it would just present different problems. 

“They could disappear when we leave,” Bill suggests. “If it’s just… something left over.”

Mike hums. He knows Bill’s been watching him, watching all of them. As long as they’ve been here, the most he’s seen him interact with his own wings has been to check that they’re drying off after the initial dive-slash-unsuccessful-flight-test. 

To be totally fair, though, that’s still more than Mike’s done. 

“I dunno…” Richie begins, then pauses, shrugs – his wings make the gesture emphatic by puffing up, feathers briefly splayed – “But – if anyone else has any more big surprises to spring on us, do it now or forever shut the fuck up.”

Mike sees that last big surprise coming before Richie does. Bill sees him, too, and cuts short his gradual push through the water toward Mike with a choked noise – which is how Mike knows that he’s also recognized him – _ Stan –  _ without knowing how or why. 

He has wings, too, hanging mostly limp in the water, and he’s far from steady on his feet; Mike and Bill surge forward as one, pushing past their friends to get supportive hands around Stan’s arms and shoulders before he can stumble headfirst into dirty water.

Stan says something so quiet Mike can’t make it out, and probably couldn’t even if whatever it was weren’t immediately interrupted by a chorus of surprised exclamations and splashing.

“Holy  _ shit,  _ Richie, what did you  _ do”— _

“I don’t know!”

“Is he okay?”

_ “No,”  _ Stan grunts. He screws his eyes shut for a moment, long enough for the rest of them to get close, and when he opens them again he at least looks more alert. The sight of his friends seems to relax him somewhat, but something about the plain white clothes he’s wearing must be upsetting in equal measure, because he closes his eyes again and without opening them asks, “Did I –  _ come back,”  _ like the words themselves are an affront, “or did – did you all…?”

Mike doesn’t know what to say to that. No one does. They all have wings, Eddie’s chest is soaked in blood but somehow completely unscathed – they know how it looks, and Stan’s always been the one who needed the most convincing about things that ought to be impossible. Unfortunately, there’s nothing harder to explain than something you don’t fully understand, yourself. Mike knows; he’s tried.

Richie mutters something about giving Stan space, but instead of following through on that, himself, he bulldozes his way into a hug that probably jostles Stan’s pewter gray wings – given the way he jumps. 

“Jesus, Stan,” Richie says, choked up like he was when Eddie woke up gasping in Pennywise’s lair. “I tried to tell them we should take the fucking clown’s head as a trophy. Guess you gotta take our word for it, huh? He’s six… hundred feet under.”

Mike is close enough to see him wince a little, but Stan makes a noise that’s almost a laugh.

“What the hell, Richie,” he says. He waits for Richie to let him go, but not without giving him a good squeeze back first. “Where was I?”

“Don’t worry about it, dude. Worry about the fact that you’re late, which means  _ you’re  _ paying for dinner.”

“I’m more worried about those – these,” Stan amends. He’s not the first of them to whack someone in the head with a wayward feathery limb – it’s just Bill’s bad luck that he happens to be in the line of fire this time. “Shit. Sorry.”

Bill doesn’t actually let go of their friend until Mike does, cautiously. It feels like he could still disappear in plain sight.

He doesn’t, though, and he stays upright just fine on his own. Maybe even better than some of them did barely an hour ago, trying to get their wing legs under them, or whatever the appropriate metaphor is.

Mike is briefly terrified when Stan’s expectant look lands on him. He can only hope his own reads as ordinary bewilderment; he really  _ doesn’t  _ have an explanation, any more than the rest of them, and it’s Bill who finally delivers the unsatisfying non-answer.

“It happened after – after we won. But that’s all we know for now.”

Stan looks ready to ask a half dozen more questions, anyway, all of which more than likely would’ve begun with “but.” Instead of arguing, he seems to waver between looking and not looking at his clothes and forearms. Mike watches Bill and Richie exchange a pointed look. Richie opens his mouth to voice whatever they’ve just silently agreed on – Mike could just be leaning closer because of the unaccustomed weight on his back – but Eddie beats them to the punch. 

“Stan,” he says, edging away but fixing him with a steady look as he goes. “I can lend you something to wear. Soon as we get back to the Townhouse. We all need to  _ actually  _ get clean.”

If they weren’t all almost as eager as Eddie is to get into fresh clothes, Eddie probably would have more than willingly dragged them bodily out of the water. A smile slips onto Stan’s face like mud squishing up between bare toes. “You guys rented a townhouse?”

“They converted one of the old mansions off Main Street into an inn,” Bev explains with a shake of her head that jostles her feathers and draws the damp curtain of her hair back over her mouth for an instant. She looks at Ben, and he laughs.

“Mike probably knows more than I do about its history.”

“Bet  _ you _ can tell us about the architecture, though,” Richie says, not without a dash of good-natured sarcasm. Mike could tell them when the place opened as a hotel – an odd move in a town as little-frequented as Derry – and better yet, that it was briefly used as a haunted house attraction before that. Every year that it was open Mike contemplated going, but something always stopped him.

He’d go now, if he could – hell, he’d put real work into helping everyone decorate it for a late-summer Halloween.

He misses Ben’s way-back recollections about the place; when he tunes back in, he finds himself trailing well behind the rest of the group as Richie regales them all with that old story about his and Eddie’s botched plan to egg one of the houses in that more affluent part of town –  _ Richie’s  _ botched plan, according to Eddie, except no matter how either of them tells it, Eddie undeniably had just as much to do with the debacle. It wasn’t  _ Richie’s  _ shoes that wound up soaked to the point of squelching with the mucousy contents of half a dozen broken shells.

Bill’s retreating back is the closest, bare skin and brown feathers draped in streamers of torn fabric. You certainly could decorate a haunted house with what’s left of their sewer-going clothes.

The tattered remnants leave a long, dark footprint on the rocky shore. As a kid, Mike remembers going out of his way to splash the pebbles when he needed a break from swimming but didn’t feel like making the trek back up to their jumping-off point. Bill asked him why, once, and he’d said it made them look polished. You could make out patterns that were normally invisible under a fine layer of dust.

It cooled them down a little, too, but maybe that was more useful before they could – in theory – fly right over the quarry’s bed of coals.

Bill drifts back to walk beside Mike. That’s easier said than done, but brushing wings with someone isn’t any more uncomfortable than brushing hands – just a little more alien. The kind of alien you get used to, maybe, and that’s a whole lot better than the kind of alien whose heart you have to rip out with your bare hands.

-*-

Their merry band slogs its way down Main Street, past freshly-polished shop windows still gleaming in the wake of the Fourth of July parade. The only signs of its passing are sun-bleached banners suspended from street lights and storefronts, and a few dusty scraps of confetti clinging stubbornly to the gutters – Stanley averts his eyes and considers asking the others if they watched the big event.

He doesn’t, actually; they would’ve been too busy.

He checks his reflection exactly once to ensure that it’s moving as he does – rigidly, with hands held just far enough from his sides that they won’t brush the  _ tachrichim.  _

He also locks eyes with an elderly man who drops his keys on the stoop of his front door when he sees them – the Losers Club, a flock of humanoid birds marching down the middle of the street. The eye contact is pretty fleeting.

Richie, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped side-eyeing him since they dragged themselves onto dry land. He probably thinks he’s being subtle, broadcasting exaggeratedly laid-back, devil-may-care nonchalance like he’s hoping it’ll be contagious.

Stanley  _ does _ try to emulate his body language in the vain hope that he’ll be able to trick his brain into internalizing some semblance of calm.

It doesn’t work, but it does lead him to a small epiphany about his friend’s wings.

At first, it’s just that the pigmentation is wrong for Richie, who hasn’t grayed at all – no one near as much as Bill has, really, and  _ his  _ wings are a mottled brown. Richie’s are  _ entirely _ shades of gray, in fact, and as Stan looks closer he’s struck by the odd familiarity not just of an old friend grown up, but of the feathers he’s started intentionally whacking Eddie with.

That doesn’t end well for him; Eddie’s wings pack a lot more of a punch.

“Richie.”

It’s telling that Richie responds to Stan’s inside voice despite his and Eddie’s escalating back-and-forth. Maybe because he anticipates another incoming mouthful of feathers, he doesn’t actually say anything, just arches his brows and widens his grin what little he can.  _ Some things never change. _

“Your wings,” Stanley begins. It’s supposed to sound matter-of-fact, but assigning the pronoun to them out loud is harder than he expected it to be. 

“Well,” Richie says, faltering enough to almost trip over his own dirt-crusted shoes. “They’re someone’s. Dug ‘em out of the lost and found body parts bin.”

A shudder shakes its way down Eddie’s wings, as if they’re personally offended. “Do you ever think about the mental images you’re dredging up  _ before  _ you say this shit?”

“Wanna hear something worse?” Richie offers, and then delivers his best effort to Stan. “I think they’d be good with honey mustard.”

Eddie says something about blue cheese. Stan rolls his eyes, feels the tips of his fingers brush damp linen, and asks, “Baked or fried?”

Eddie lets Stan have his pick of shirts to butcher into something wearable. Said butchering is done via a pair of blunt, slightly tarnished scissors they find tucked into the hotel’s front desk, and the end result is two long, parallel cuts that leave a loose flap of fraying fabric to dangle between his wings. It looks and feels awful, but he wasn’t  _ buried  _ in it, so it still comes as a relief almost as tangible as showering off the grime of the quarry and the dusty walk back.

It isn’t as if their clothes are likely to make them any more or less of a spectacle, anyway.

“Any chance you could spare a few more of those?” 

Eddie unburies his fingers from the short feathers lining the fleshy crest of his left wing and stops pacing in front of the bar – which is  _ also  _ a relief, considering he’s come close to bowling over assorted mixers and a precariously placed bottle of bourbon several dozen times already.

“Shirts? For what?”

Beverly doesn’t look up from her phone. Her brows are pinched in thought. Stan guesses she’s probably sending texts as part of their group’s continued debate over where and how they’re going to get food looking like they just crawled off the cover of a dime store fantasy novel. The other four are still trudging about upstairs, wrapping up their own turns with the four functional, non-blood-soaked bathrooms.

“Buttons,” Bev finally responds. With a soft click, her phone’s screen goes dark. When she leans forward, her wings leave a damp patch on the back of the couch. “Might be a little more painless than going out to buy some.”

“Not for my clothes, it won’t!” Eddie protests.

Someone upstairs thuds their way to the top of the stairs. Stan waits for whoever it is to come down and join them, but after a moment or two of silence he shrugs and asks, “Did anyone bring a sewing kit?” 

Bev shakes her head and looks at Eddie. He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, of course.”

Richie’s laugh reaches them from down the hall and up above. “Seriously?”

Eddie all but stomps his way to the doorframe and calls up, “It’s on every packing list ever, asshole, it’s called being prepared – what the hell are you wearing?”

“Apparently nothing as good as you got,” comes Richie’s answer, plus approaching footsteps. “What’s the back look like?”

“Like shit, obviously. We’re working on it,” Eddie tells him, backing up so Richie can get past him – and apparently also so Richie can’t sneak a rear view of his shirt.

Richie, on the other hand, makes a grand gesture of flexing even before he’s forced to turn sideways in order to squeeze past a wide-eyed Eddie. The edge of one of his wings clips a bottle of bitters, knocking it clean off the bar, but no one bothers trying to pick it up. Stan makes a mental note to grab it before they leave.

For now, he gives Richie a bemused once-over.

He’s cut the sleeves off of a T-shirt –  _ way  _ off, so that the holes dip almost all the way to the bottom hem of what’s left; most of his chest and stomach are visible on either side, but more so on the right, where he must have accidentally cut a little too much away. The fabric is bunched between his wings.

He pretends not to have noticed the bitters’ tragic fate and lounges against the bar with a performative casualness that’s only undermined by the way he very pointedly does not return Eddie’s wide-eyed stare.

Bev turns her phone on again – Stan’s stomach lurches into his throat – and she snaps a few pictures of Richie, who flexes again with a wink and a laugh. “Think I can pull off the college jock thing?”

“Totally,” Bev assures him.

Eddie doesn’t take even that most obvious of bait. They narrate their text conversation with Bill, Mike and Ben, for Stan’s benefit mostly, and Eddie manages to look surprised when Richie asks him what he thinks and brings up his supposed food allergies – which gives Stan pause. All Eddie does is shrug and mumble that he cares less about  _ what  _ he eats than about  _ when  _ he does, and then it’s Richie’s raised eyebrow that doesn’t make sense to Stan.

They could all waltz into a restaurant together, get a feel for people’s reactions before they have to make the dive back into their lives outside of Derry. But who wants to deal with unanticipated problems after everything else they’ve been through in less than two full days?

(“What are they gonna do,” Richie asks, “come at us with torches and pitchforks?”)

There are parks, quiet spots tucked behind empty old buildings. There’s a sandwich place, a newer, more polished version of the one that used to be there. Bev relays Mike’s confirmation that it changed owners just a few years ago when the original owners’ daughter moved down south somewhere. 

To Georgia, maybe, well away from unforgiving Maine winters—

“I can go,” Stan says. He’s the only one who hasn’t been up – awake,  _ alive? –  _ for twenty-four hours straight. It’s only fair, and there could be a working payphone en route.

Bev relays this to the rest of the group, even though Bill and Mike are already on their way down the stairs as she types.

Stan lets his gaze linger on her phone too long, maybe. Bev’s tired frown softens when she notices, and she holds the phone out to him before he can be so bold as to actually ask for the favor. It’s still unlocked; he nearly drops it, then rattles off a random number, “Ten minutes,” already on his way past his friends, out the door, to the front porch.

He dials with his thumb and keeps the fingers of his other hand pressed against his pulse – but it won’t feel real, he thinks, until the ringback tone cuts out and Patty picks up. 

That small relief doesn’t come quickly, but he only has to call once.

“Hello?”

She’s been crying. The knot in Stanley’s stomach draws itself tight again. If she knew it was him, she’d know he’s on the verge of crying, too.

“Stanley’s friend?” 

He has to brace himself against the railing. The wings on his back form a loose cocoon about his shoulders, muffling everything around him that doesn’t come through the phone’s speaker.

“They – they called you?”

Patty’s breath hitches. Stan is afraid she’ll hang up, but instead she whispers his name, twice, and then, “Who is this?”

“It’s me,” Stan says. “Babylove, I”—

The call ends with a click that makes Stan flinch. He wavers for a long moment there, torn between calling back, himself, or going back inside to ask one of the Losers to vouch for him instead. He flutters his wings like he’s shuffling a deck of cards, trips on his way to the door and lets go of the handle as if it had just burned him.

The phone rings. Stanley jumps and brings it up to his ear so fast that it takes him a moment to realize he just answered a video call. 

The bags under Patty’s eyes could give the rest of the Losers Club a run for their money. Her shoulders are hunched around her ears and she’s frowning – glaring, really, until the camera catches up with Stan’s sudden movement and she sees him, his mouth hanging open around a plea or an apology.

“Stanley –  _ oh,”  _ she gasps. The connection isn’t good enough for a clear picture, but Stan is fairly certain he’d see fresh tears on her cheeks if it were. He sinks onto the nearest wicker loveseat and touches the grainy image of his wife’s face with the pad of his thumb. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say. 

Patty lets out a choked sob. “Don’t.”

“I’m okay,” he says, struggling to offer credible reassurance in the absence of an explanation.  _ “Really  _ okay, Pats –  _ alive,  _ and – and okay. I didn’t mean to scare you, but I need you to know. And if you’ll let me, I’d like to see you. Here or back home, we can even meet at a restaurant, your choice. A park, bus terminal, it doesn’t”—

“Where?” Almost challengingly, as if she doesn’t quite believe he’ll be able to answer her, she repeats, “Where are you, Stanley?”

He has to get up to check the address. He reads it to Patty like you’d recite a prayer; waits for her to find Derry, Maine on a map and gives her the nearest thing he can to complete answers. He thinks, in a wave of giddy relief, that as far as the wings are concerned, he probably has the easiest time any of them are going to have with the reveal – that they’re real, maybe even fully functional, and almost certainly identical to the wings of a real bird.

“My friends have them too,” he says. He can’t bring himself to say, yet, that that reassures him because what happened to him didn’t happen to them. 

He remembers Eddie’s shirt, blood-stained, ruined front  _ and  _ back, and rushes to add, “I know I’ve never mentioned them, so this might not make much sense, but they’re some of the most important – best people I’ve ever known, and. Well, I think they might have saved me, somehow.”

“If that’s true, I can’t thank them enough,” Patty says, and for the first time since that night, he gets to see her smile. “You’ll introduce us?”

Stanley smiles back at her, but the promise comes out heavy, weighed down with all the sincerity he can muster. 

“Thank you,” she says. She’s moving, their white confetti ceiling passing in a blur behind her head. Packing one-handed. She should go, but neither of them wants to risk losing sight of each other just yet. They haven’t shared enough joy between them to blot out the shadow of the last few days.

So he waits for her to shake her favorite sweater off its hanger and into a suitcase, watches her pull pairs of pants for both of them from a drawer and cross the room again. She keeps glancing back at the screen to meet his eyes, fleetingly, until finally he says something to hold her gaze on him.

“You might actually know some of them, sort of. Bev, Bill… Bill Denbrough, the best-selling author…?”  _ Whose book you quit halfway through? _

He watches Patty’s eyes widen with a little glow of pride. “… _ the  _ William Denbrough?”

“He’s not as dismal as his books,” Stan promises with a smile that comes so much easier all of a sudden. 

He tells her about all of them, as he knew them before and is just beginning to know them now, and in the process of letting those floodgates open he probably triples his original time estimate. They eventually send Richie out to check on him.

Patty sees him coming first; she even greets him. Stanley figures that’s a good sign, and when he turns to look, Richie is grinning at the phone.

“Hey, planning a trip to New England’s best kept secret?” He crowds into the frame and then leans in even closer, so that Stan’s view of Patty is mostly obscured by his big head. “The secret is there’s nothing to do here.”

He straightens up to reveal Patty still blinking back surprise. He wonders if she recognizes Richie’s wings, too, but what she says is, “Stanley, have I met your friend at some point?”

A quick glance at Richie reveals no unexpected flash of recognition on his end. Richie answers the searching look with raised eyebrows and an ominous spark of mischief; Stan rolls his eyes and says, “He’s that comedian who only makes bad jokes.”

“But I prefer ‘Richie.’”

“Oh,” Patty realizes. “Stanley – are they  _ all  _ famous? – ah, it isn’t that they’re  _ all  _ bad,” she adds in a hurry. “They’re not bad at all, just a bit…”

Richie laughs. “Nah, they’re bad. I don’t, uh… it’s something I’m working on.” He answers Stan’s curious look with a shrug.

Apparently he’s missed a thing or two already. If he’s lucky, most of the Losers will stick around long enough for him to make up for lost time.

Richie continues talking over the audible rumbling of his stomach, although out of view of the camera he pats his belly and raises a can’t-you-see-I’m-wasting-away-over-here eyebrow at Stan. “Hey, if you’re packing anyway, think you could throw in some buttons”—he glances again at Stan—“do people keep spare zippers lying around? Bev’s been talking about zippers…”

Patty looks back up at them, one of Stan’s shirts draped over her arm. She frowns a little as her eyes skim their wings; combined, they eclipse most of the background, and Stan belatedly thinks to robotically extend one so that a patch of cobwebbed siding comes into view behind it. Somewhere to place him, a context to tide her over while she’s on the road. He’ll have to return Bev’s phone to her sooner or later – it’s vibrated to signal incoming emails several times already – but maybe she’d be willing to text Patty a picture or two of the Townhouse, preferably with a handful of them present.

“Buttons and zippers? They don’t look like crows’ wings,” Patty says after a pause, her voice going breathy the way it does when she’s politely trying not to laugh. “Or magpies’.”

She quits holding it in check when Richie cackles into Stan’s ear. Stan doubts he actually gets the joke; he’s just the kind of guy who finds the mere act of cracking a joke inherently funny. “Hey, I almost managed to convince Bill to just wear muscle tees for the rest of his natural life”—

“In the winter?”

“That’s what Bev said,” he whines. He moves out of frame to slouch like a half-empty potato sack –  _ wearing  _ a fully-empty potato sack – against a porch beam. “Now all anyone wants is a few shirts that aren’t ‘ninety-percent ruined.’ ‘Least Bev’s saving my manager one of about a million headaches.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Patty promises. Her voice softens, and she says, just to Stan this time, “Am I keeping you?”

“I have to go pick up a couple loaves of bread to throw at him,” Stan sighs, jerking his head in Richie’s direction. Richie flips him off. “When do you think you’ll… I’ll see you?”

“Tonight,” Patty promises. “As soon as I possibly can. Can I send the flight details to this number?”

“We’ll make sure you have everyone’s,” Richie says. “‘Cept Bill’s, ‘cause he fucking ruined his in the sewer.”

“The sewer…?”

Richie winces and mouths an apology, which Stan brushes off with a resigned shrug of his own; she was going to hear about it all tonight regardless. It isn’t even a matter of believing or not, and if he can handle it, there isn’t a doubt in Stan’s mind that she can. 

It’s just a very… “Long story. Maybe Richie’d like to tell you about it when you meet him in person.”

No need to clarify to Patty that he’s joking, but the uncertain look on Richie’s face is priceless. Patty laughs. Her laughter gives way to a quiet sigh.

“Look after him for me, please, Richie?”

Richie displaces a feather trying to synchronize his arm and wing for a wrong-handed salute, aborted at the last moment to avoid risking any further damage to his glasses. His mouth is smiling, but his eyebrows are angled in a frown. Stan doesn’t know what to do with himself, or which of them to look at.

“Well, yeah,” Richie says, “that goes without saying.”

-*-

They take their breakfast – which is really more of a late lunch – in the alley that separates the back of the Derry Townhouse from the Baptist church on Jackson Street. It’s a far cry from an idyllic trip to the park, and there isn’t much of anywhere to sit, but the walk out to it is short, it gives them an opportunity to stretch their wings without all the property damage and the only audience they’re likely to have is stray cats and mice. It’s practically fine dining, given the circumstances.

Eddie still finds shit to complain about, of course. Richie watches him scuff his shoes in dirt that glitters faintly in the sun, claiming it’s probably got bits of broken glass and “who even knows what else” mixed into it, but when he finally relents long enough to tuck into his conspicuously poultry-free sandwich, Richie sorta thinks the reason he looks so blissed out has just as much to do with the sun on his feathers as it does with the food in his stomach.

Everything about him looks warmer in this light, down to the lines on his face when he frowns.

“Oh, yeah,” Stan says, inadvertently reminding Richie to keep his eyes to himself – and in the weirdest way possible: “Richie, you’re a pigeon.”

Richie sputters. “The hell did I do?”

“What?” Eddie echoes. “What, you mean his wings?”

Well, then, what a relief that he still has them sandwiched between his back and the brick wall behind him. Uncomfortable, but tolerable. The feathers cushion the skin beneath them only slightly better than a light jacket would – if he could fucking wear one.

Mike steps back from the wall beside him to squint at Stan, not Richie. “You recognize them?”

Stan sets his untouched sub down on the nearest trash can lid; Eddie wrinkles his nose at the mere two layers of paper separating the food from certain contamination by tetanus, and then he looks at Richie and wrinkles his brow. 

“I don’t think it takes a seasoned birdwatcher to know a rock pigeon’s wings when you see them,” Stan says dismissively. The preening begins – not literally,  _ yet _ – when he nods at the rest of them, starting with Ben and his hard-to-miss angel-white wings.

_ Figures,  _ Richie thinks.  _ He comes out looking like a cherub and I’m a fucking pigeon. _

“But that got me thinking,” Stan is saying. “A lot of real birds have uniformly white wings like that – a  _ lot _ of freshwater ones, actually, so I’m not  _ as  _ sure, but I’m thinking maybe an egret, or a goose…”

“Swan,” Bev says with a finality that doesn’t sound like just a suggestion. No one looks more surprised than Ben, but since all he actually says is “Huh,” it’s probably a small mercy on Bev’s part that she promptly asks Stan, “What about mine?”

“Robin,” Stan says with a quick smile. “Obviously most of their coloring is on their abdomens, but it looks right, anyway. If it weren’t for that little bit”—and he gestures at the upper edges of her wings, where there’s a hint of orange—“I probably wouldn’t know; I’m not sure about Mike or myself. Probably more songbirds?”

He shrugs, then casts a thoughtful look Mike’s way. “I’m sure I can work it out with a little research. The white bands on yours look familiar, it’s been bothering me…”

“That’s – that’s so interesting,” Mike starts. For a guy who’s been going out of his way not to touch his own wings, let alone anyone else’s, he’s far too happy about the human-bird mutant trivia. “Maybe it’s not just random. It’s one thing to – to  _ guess,  _ but imagine if we could know for sure! Somewhere – someone might be able to run tests, figure out what it”—

Richie raises his hand in protest. “Whoa, I may be a flying rat, but that doesn’t mean I wanna be a lab rat, too.”

Eddie’s eyes have gone comically wide. Before Stan or Mike can offer Richie a rebuttal, Eddie gestures impatiently at the former, and at his own wings flapping just enough to rasp against the wall behind him. Thwisp, thwisp, thwisp.

“What are these supposed to be?” he demands.

“Well,” Stan hedges, “bird of prey, definitely. The wing shape, size – has to be.”

Now that _ – that  _ makes a weird kind of sense. The universe got one thing right, pegging Eddie as enough of a badass to pull that off.

All Richie says  _ aloud  _ is, “Cool,” and when that doesn’t put a dent in Eddie’s incredulous staring, he prompts, “Like a hawk?”

“More like an eagle,” Stan corrects. “Golden or Bald, but  _ that  _ identification is hard when you have an entire bird to work with, sometimes.”

“Wow, Eds, way to celebrate Independence Day in style,” Richie says with a laugh while Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Ugh. Let’s just say Golden and leave it at that.”

“You may be the national bird in these here parts, but pigeons are worldwide, baby,” Richie crows, fully ignoring that request. Eddie rolls his eyes at his shitty accent, but not without an accidental flash of dimpled cheeks that sets Richie’s heart  _ and  _ wings aflutter.

“So you also have an idea about Bill?” Mike asks, still talking fast enough to rival Eddie, and faster with every word. “His are distinctive, aren’t they? Have you noticed the backs?”

_ “I  _ h-hadn’t, really,” Bill interjects, politely curious. “I think I’ll be fine as long as I’m not another kind of pigeon, though.”

“Hey!”

“Some pigeons are actually very beautiful,” Stan tells him. The ‘flying rats like Richie notwithstanding’ is implied.

“Fuck you guys.”

“For what it’s worth, since I guess we don’t know if  _ any  _ of us can actually… you know, fly, it might not matter, but you know how there’s only one species of quail that’s native to this region?”

Of course no one does, despite Stan’s clear assumption that it must be common knowledge. He rolls his eyes at the lot of them, fondly exasperated. “Okay, well, there’s only one, and I  _ know  _ you’ve all seen them, because I remember pointing them out”—

“What does that have to do with flying?” Ben asks. 

“The  _ Bobwhite,”  _ Stan finishes pointedly,  _ “can  _ fly, but mostly they’re ground-dwelling, so it’s short-distance and not all that high.”

“Guess Eddie’s got us beat,” Bev comments with a grin, chin propped on her hand, elbow propped on her knees. The bottom edges of her lowest-hanging feathers scrape the ground where she’s sitting.

Eddie huffs. “I”m not gonna fly, though. What happens if one of us breaks a wing? Where would we even go? The ER, or an animal hospital?”

Richie catches himself wincing.

“Learn how to do it ourselves,” Bill suggests.

Ben stares at him, aghast. “Do  _ what?” _

“In college, I used to do my laundry in a combination laundromat-bar,” Bev says. “Maybe we can do something with that, get ‘em to make a one-stop shop.”

“Genius,” Richie laughs. “Eds, you’re a big business guy, right? Who do we make this pitch to?”

“Really?” Stan interrupts, finally distracted from his bird-y line of thought. “What do you do, exactly?”

One sharp look from Eddie silences Richie before he can offer his own answer. He grins and makes a sweeping “as you wish” gesture with his arm – and pantomimes zipping his mouth shut, but Eddie’s already launched into a rapid-fire explanation and doesn’t see that part.

Turns out Stan went into finance, too. No surprise there. Richie would have asked him more of those “what have you been up to” icebreaker questions, himself, but now that they’ve found time for that between resurrection and mundane errands, he finds he’s better equipped just to listen to the two of them trade details, instead.

He’s so busy eavesdropping and lamenting his total lack of non-show biz job experience that he hasn’t got the slightest clue what everyone else gets to discussing, ‘til Bev kicks her leg out lazily in Bill’s direction and asks, “So what do you think of all this, Bill? Got any plans?”

Bill answers like it’s the  _ first  _ time he’s thought about all this. Bev might as well have just asked for his opinion on next week’s weather forecast. “I could probably do a short story about it or something. I’d get the realism down.”

Richie laughs with Ben and Bev and Mike, whose eyes twinkle at the promise, but it’s food for thought; there’s at  _ least  _ some slapstick potential in showing up on stage with a massive set of wings. A few good nights’ rest might even imbue Richie with the ability to come up with a whole bit about it. Might not even matter that he totally bombed in Chicago; they can bill the second half of his tour as a carnival sideshow to restore interest.

“Hitchcock already wrote  _ The Birds,”  _ Eddie cuts in. Richie looks up from the mayonnaise-heavy remains of his sandwich, appetite ruined, and catches Eddie’s eyes as they skip right over him, briefly. “Just saying.”

“Well,  _ actually,”  _ Richie twangs, pushing his glasses up just for show, “he only directed it, this other guy did the screenplay and it’s based – shuddup,  _ Stan,  _ it’s based on a short story, so…”

Eddie’s eyes land on him again. He’s smiling, almost laughing. Richie tries not to look too pleased about it.

“I bet no one’s done flying zombies,” Ben says. 

“There you go,” Mike laughs. “You could make it a sequel to that one about the cell phones!”

Bill groans. “I don’t know why I wrote that.”

Stan looks positively vindicated. “And Richie used to make fun of  _ me  _ for acting like an old man.”

“Because you do! You still do!”

“He did ask if I had any cardigans,” Eddie says innocently. His cool exterior only cracks when Stan flips him off, which doesn’t make Richie at all jealous because that would be stupid.

Bev snorts and announces that she might have to draw the line at altering a cardigan to accommodate wings – and besides, at that point you might as well just knit the thing from scratch, extra button-holes and all.

Richie wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Patty Uris knows how to knit. He’s sure of it, in fact, and he’ll be deeply disappointed if she doesn’t show up later today toting a few of Staniel’s favorites.

One phonecall-crashing in to knowing her, and already those two are doing wonders for Richie’s outlook on the Losers’ potential for success in love and romance – or whatever other fortune cookie slogan he’d have stuck in the back of his head now, if his Jade of the Orient misfortune cookie had come out with the usual banalities printed on it.

Too bad Pennywise was never the type to throw Richie a bone, like  _ ‘Try confessing to that special someone,’ ‘The love of your life loves you back’  _ or even  _ ‘You can’t prove he won’t divorce his wife and marry you instead.’ _

_ Wonders but not miracles, _ he thinks. Two and a half miracles – he’s not convinced that the wings aren’t mostly a curse, after all – and he’s tempting the wrath of some higher power, wanting it to be three and a half.

Maybe he’ll ask Eddie how he plans to break the news to his wife –  _ after  _ they’ve all slept, when he’s sixty percent less likely to get his head bitten off about it. His more vindictive half gets a kick out of imagining Mrs. Kaspbrak clutching a pearl necklace in one hand and gesturing at the checkered floor tiles and dentist’s office green curtains of a cartoonishly 1950s kitchen, shrilly declaring, “I always knew you were a night owl, but I  _ never  _ thought…!”

Something, something, cold turkey… The whole ridiculous scene pretty much falls apart when he tries to imagine Eddie in it. The guy may style his hair like an eighty year old and dress like this decade’s equivalent to a fifties office worker, but he’s altogether too real to be collapsed into dated stereotypes, even hypothetically. 

_ And  _ Richie has a second half that grudgingly hopes things go alright for him, with his wife that he’s not-so-happily married to and his job that probably doesn’t provide a lot of opportunities for theatrically shifting people’s attention away from giant feathery appendages.

He probably has a big corner office – Stan, too – but is it several-meters-wide-just-to-get-through-the-door big?

They’ll have to accommodate him  _ somehow, _ give him a key to the roof or let him work from home while they renovate—

“Earth to Tozier, come in.”

Eddie elbows his way into the limited space between Richie and a broken bottle whose label has long since melted off under repeated rainfall. Richie contemplates tossing the rest of his sandwich into one of the mostly collapsed, water damaged boxes lining the alley a little further down, but decides he’d rather not immediately run off with Eddie’s big doe eyes focused suddenly, entirely on him.

“Knew I shoulda gone for the buffalo chicken,” he says. Eddie grimaces at him. From his place against the opposite wall, squashed between four other grown adults all trying to catch a glimpse of his latest Google image search, Stan raises an eyebrow at nothing in particular.

“Uh, well, there’ll be plenty of time for cannibalism after a few hours of sleep,” Eddie says. “You know you don’t have to actually fall asleep in this nasty fucking alley, right?”

“You live in New York City and you think  _ this  _ alley is nasty?”

“They all are.” 

The longer Eddie waits in silence for Richie to figure out what kind of follow-up Eddie’s expecting from him, the droopier his shoulders  _ and  _ wings get, like a dog getting scolded for chewing up sneakers. Eventually he shrugs some life back into them and starts to move away, back toward the Townhouse. Richie perks up a little, himself, when he half-turns to say something else, but he’s no longer talking just to Richie.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m gonna turn in for a while before I pass out and get a faceful of rat shit.”

“Suit yourself,” Bev says. She’s holding one hand away from herself, as if there were a cigarette perched in it; Richie can almost trick himself into seeing smoke curling from the fingers she wiggles in Eddie’s direction.

“See you at dinner,” Bill adds.

Richie hesitates through several more tired farewells, only a tiny little handful of seconds, then offers a slow Disney-princess celebrity wave of his own as a prelude to pushing off from the brick wall and half-jogging, half-batting uselessly at noticeably fresher air – which is a thing his wings just  _ do,  _ apparently, ain’t that just delightful – in order to catch up with Eddie.

“Hey,” he says, but Eddie’s already blinking at him. In dimmer light, he’d call it batting his eyelashes.

He offers him his leftovers and watches Eddie recoil mid-step.

“What”—

“Throw it away for me?”

“Throw your own trash away!”

Richie pretends not to notice the giant rust-colored dumpster they pass on their way in. Eddie doesn’t comment on it, either. He’s still holding his own oily sandwich wrapper, and given his abrupt sigh the second the back door squeaks shut behind them, Richie suspects he’d be wringing his hands if it weren’t for it. He has to settle for folding the corners instead.

“So,” he begins.

Richie elongates it: “Soooo.”

They stare at each other, stalled in front of the door to Richie’s room. Down the hall, there’s blood drying on the floorboards, smeared into the carpet at the top of the stairs.

Eddie doesn’t look at it, or at anything that isn’t Richie and his rat wings. Coming from anyone else, the intensity would be freaky. Coming from Eddie it’s only mildly unsettling, like staring down the barrel of a laser gun as it charges in slow-mo, except you’re dreaming and it’s a cartoon laser gun and you have no idea what it’ll do when it eventually fires. 

Richie clears his throat and tries not to squirm. His hand is inching toward the doorknob, but it’s a futile gesture; it’s not like he has it in him to shut the door in Eddie’s face. “Housekeeping’s gonna love us, huh?”

Eddie raises an eyebrow at him and shrugs a little. “Housekeeping can bill me for the damages.” His tone implies that’s not all housekeeping can do. Richie’s sure he would say it outright if he weren’t so clearly distracted.

He watches Eddie lift one of his wings away from his back. Richie can’t tell if he’s  _ intentionally  _ obscuring Richie’s view of his blood on the floor, but the effect is like a curtain being drawn over the night’s festivities.

_ That’s all, folks! _

“Are you okay?”

Richie contorts his features into another smile. “Tired.”

That seems to break some of Eddie’s concentration. He shuffles in place, arms crossed, as Richie watches his wings shift and wonders if it would be weird to keep a feather if one happened to fall. People keep hair in lockets – it’s just usually not the hair of their best friends who are  _ married. _

“Oh,” Eddie says, and Richie almost flinches. “Yeah, this,” he huffs, crumpling his bedraggled sandwich wrapper into a little ball in one hand, “this is fucking… weird. I thought explaining why I want a divorce  _ now,  _ after the trip here, out of the blue – that  _ that  _ was gonna be the toughest thing to explain, but…”

He presses his lips into a flat line and gives Richie an expectant look. Richie shouldn’t be focusing on how cute it is that he thinks he’s being subtle about dropping this  _ gigantic fucking bomb  _ into the middle of a conversation – scratch that, small talk – but it is. It’s disarming. And as big a deal as the mere mention of a pending divorce obviously is, it doesn’t feel as big as Eddie working himself up to tell Richie in particular, at the first opportunity,  _ alone. _

Eddie appears to be fighting down a smile, and so is Richie, after a delirious moment wherein he wonders if he actually  _ did  _ fall asleep in that alley.

“Aw, Eds – I’ve never been a lawyer before, but for you, I’ll give it a go.”

That draws a laugh out of Eddie.  _ Music to my ears.  _ He raps his knuckles against Richie’s shoulder and says, “Thanks, but I want it to go over sort of smoothly. I’d settle for keeping in touch, though?”

There could be a smaller pair of wings unfurling in Richie’s chest, the way it threatens to burst. He beams at Eddie, feeling not quite as tired as he was a moment ago. “Yeah! Obviously!”

“And – if you’re still touring,” Eddie begins almost apologetically.

Richie blows a raspberry. “Dunno if I’m naive enough to assume I can pull off ad-libbing a whole new set in the middle of a tour.”

“Not  _ naive,”  _ Eddie starts to argue. He stops, frowns, and changes course all in a fraction of a second. “Well, maybe you could visit me sometime anyway, when I have a place. Think I’ll be pretty much stuck in the city for… jeez, I don’t even know, or I’d ask to see your big tacky house in person.”

At some point Richie relaxed enough to sag against the frame of his door, a totally laid-back pose that he has to work to maintain as soon as he realizes how natural it is, and how easy it makes it to sound blasé when he answers, “You can see my big – very  _ chic,  _ I’ll have you know – house anytime, door’s always open. I’ll get a leather chaise lounge so you can lay on it and talk to me about your divorce.”

Eddie’s grin returns full force. “Dick. Just say shit like that for an hour and you’ll be fine.”

He steps back like he’s ungluing himself from Richie and his hand from the wall. He’s already pulling a face at the scene behind him.

If he’d said yes right away, Richie thinks he probably would have offered to trade him rooms, too, or to share or help him check his broken-and-entered room out before he has to go in alone with his wings tucked like armor against his sides.

He would have, if Eddie didn’t look so reassured already.

-*-

Not much setting sunlight makes it past the layers of glass and manicured trees and dust to the bar on the first floor of the Derry Townhouse, but enough snakes its way through the window of Bev’s room to send her shuffling down there, anyway, dragging reluctantly-donned shoes that probably leave scuff marks on the carpet. And that’s not even the worst damage they’ll leave behind when they go, between the incident with Bowers and then Bill completely obliterating a lamp and several mostly-full bottles of good liquor.

She pours herself a drink from the surviving selection, but doesn’t drink it. Instead she wishes she had thought to pocket her pack of cigarettes before shambling down here; it’s not  _ quite  _ worth the trip back up to get them – at least not yet. She doesn’t even have her lighter to fidget with, so instead she listens to the liquid in the glass slosh as she drags it back and forth across the counter. It doesn’t smell good, never has.

Something brushes the tip of her right wing. She gasps and drives the glass forward with enough force to spill the drink  _ and  _ send the glass hurtling onto the ground on the other side of the bar.

When she whips around in her seat, she doesn’t see Ben taking a hurried step back; she sees raised hands, and that’s it, and if her drink hadn’t broken well out of her reach, the hand she braces on the polished wood behind her might have found a jagged weapon and used it. 

But there’s just a puddle and the cloying scent of liquor burning her nostrils.

Ben’s voice filters through a moment later, asking if she’s okay. Apologizing. 

Bev takes shaky, gradually deeper breaths, wrinkles her nose in a grimace, wipes her hand off on her pants. A moment later, Ben hands her one of the tiny square napkins from the half-full dispenser. A few of them have already materialized over the spill, soaked-through but more or less getting the job done.

“Sorry.”

“Good morning,” Bev answers, although it’s almost dark out now; with the lights on inside, it’s getting harder to see outside. Shadows gradually losing definition against the deepening gray light, then street lamps and closed or closing shop windows with orange-lit displays. The jewelers has a string of blue and white lights framing its window, but no red.

She watches a car pass without slowing and finally remembers to lean forward enough to quit crushing her wings against the wood at her back. When she looks at Ben, he’s still watching her.

“Is Mrs. Uris still on her way here?”

Ben shakes his head. “Stan slipped out with her a while ago. She brought his phone, though, so…”

She pats the seat beside her, not realizing it’s suffered some runoff liquor until Ben demurely takes the one on her left, instead. He folds his hands on his bouncing knee and smiles, but there’s still a glimmer of uncertainty to it. Haltingly, he says, “On the bright side, it’ll be hard to sneak up on any of us.”

He manages to look  _ more  _ nervous, telling a joke, and to really make it clear that that’s what it is, he nods at her wings. They’re unkempt – the feathery equivalent of bedhead, Bev supposes – but Ben’s are inexplicably tidy. Now that she’s looking, she can even see the bright white of them reflected in the window and the bar’s assorted bottles. It should be nearly impossible for  _ him  _ to sneak up on anyone, not the other way around.

She leans forward slightly so that her hair obscures her face, then winds up brushing it behind her ear to give him a wry look. “You weren’t trying to.”

An uncomfortable beat passes between that and a word of agreement. “But I should have said something.”

“Next time.”

Ben’s eyes light up just a little at that. “Next time?”

Bev takes a breath and slowly lets it go. Imagines it’s carrying a puff of smoke into the air between them. “The next time I see you,” she says as gently as she can. She’s afraid she just sounds tired, so to help lighten the blow – and because he’s still here, now, with his elbow on the counter and his shoulders drooping with exhaustion – she rests a hand against his shoulder, just shy of his wings. She’d like to tousle the feathers, too, but she won’t do it without permission.

“I have to take care of things in New York. I want,” she says, gesturing between them as her grip on Ben’s shoulder tightens, “this to be a fresh start,  _ after. _ I think we both deserve that.”

She braces for Ben to pull away from her, or worse, but his hand comes up to cover hers before she’s realized she ever looked down, and he moves very little after that. 

“I’ll wait for you,” he says, almost reverent. Nothing about his smile looks forced, or even surprised. How she ever failed to read that open book of a face… “As long as you need, Bev.”

“It could be a long time.”

“I know.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Me, too,” Ben says, smiling with his whole face while his eyes inch toward shedding tears. “But… I think it’ll be better, knowing  _ who _ I’m missing. And we have phones, you know, if you want…”

Bev laughs once and drops her hand to Ben’s leg. “Yeah, of  _ course,  _ I didn’t mean no contact, only”—

“To take it slow?”

“To wait it out,” Bev adjusts. She pauses to consider. “And then… yeah.” She shrugs. “Maybe.”

It’s Ben who realizes that they have yet to actually exchange phone numbers – Mike does  _ not  _ need to be playing operator for them, which means reminders for the other Losers are probably in order, too – but in the meantime, just having Ben’s name and number safely stored in her phone does wonders for Bev’s peace of mind. 

She looks at it after it’s saved, after she’s held the camera up to him and waited for the nod of permission to snap a picture for his contact image – his earnest smile, the halo glow of light behind him, his wings blotting out the rest of the background – and just in case, she also takes a screenshot.

She might even email it to herself later, she thinks, with a subject line reading,  _ “Important!” _

Or maybe just a line of poetry.

**Author's Note:**

> I realize this is incredibly extra but this is already a wingfic, so if anyone is _curious_ I did in fact put some Thought into which birds everyone's wings would come from. Some were explicitly named in this first chapter, but they are as follows:
> 
> Ben - Mute swan  
> Bev - American robin  
> Bill - Northern bobwhite  
> Eddie - Golden eagle  
> Mike - Chipping sparrow  
> Richie - Rock dove aka common pigeon  
> Stan - Black capped chickadee


End file.
